John
Pilger: on a piratical war that brought terrorism and death to Iraq.

Blair is a war criminal, and all those who have been,
in one form or another, accessories should be reported to the
International Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of
pretexts few now take seriously, they brought terrorism and death to
Iraq.

10 Apr 2003

A BBC television producer, moments before he was
wounded by an American fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with
"friendly fire", spoke to his mother on a satellite phone.
Holding the phone over his head so that she could hear the sound of the
American planes overhead, he said: "Listen, that's the sound of
freedom."

Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man
was being ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever
designed the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind
when he wrote the weasel headline: "The moment young Omar
discovered the price of war". These cowardly words accompanied a
photograph of an American marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old
Omar, having just participated in the mass murder of his father, mother,
two sisters and brother during the unprovoked invasion of their
homeland, in breach of the most basic law of civilised peoples.

No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal
newspaper; no honest headline, such as: "This American marine
murdered this boy's family". No photograph of Omar's father,
mother, sisters and brother dismembered and blood-soaked by automatic
fire. Versions of the Observer's propaganda picture have been appearing
in the Anglo-American press since the invasion began: tender cameos of
American troops reaching out, kneeling, ministering to their
"liberated" victims.

And where were the pictures from the village of Furat,
where 80 men, women and children were rocketed to death? Apart from the
Mirror, where were the pictures, and footage, of small children holding
up their hands in terror while Bush's thugs forced their families to
kneel in the street? Imagine that in a British high street. It is a
glimpse of fascism, and we have a right to see it.

"To initiate a war of aggression," said the
judges in the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, "is not only
an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole." In stating this guiding principle
of international law, the judges specifically rejected German arguments
of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against other
countries.

Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and
their media court do now will change the truth of their great crime in
Iraq. It is a matter of record, understood by the majority of humanity,
if not by those who claim to speak for "us". As Denis Halliday
said of the Anglo-American embargo against Iraq, it will "slaughter
them in the history books". It was Halliday who, as assistant
secretary general of the United Nations, set up the "oil for
food" programme in Iraq in 1996 and quickly realised that the UN
had become an instrument of "a genocidal attack on a whole
society". He resigned in protest, as did his successor, Hans von
Sponeck, who described "the wanton and shaming punishment of a
nation".

I have mentioned these two men often in these pages,
partly because their names and their witness have been airbrushed from
most of the media. I well remember Jeremy Paxman bellowing at Halliday
on Newsnight shortly after his resignation: "So are you an
apologist for Saddam Hussein?" That helped set the tone for the
travesty of journalism that now daily, almost gleefully, treats criminal
war as sport. In a leaked e-mail Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television
News, described the BBC's war coverage as "extraordinary - it
almost feels like World Cup football when you go from Um Qasr to another
theatre of war somewhere else and you're switching between
battles".

He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans
do, and no one will say so, even when they are murdering journalists.
They bring to this one-sided attack on a weak and mostly defenceless
people the same racist, homicidal intent I witnessed in Vietnam, where
they had a whole programme of murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs
through all their foreign wars, as it does through their own divided
society. Take your pick of the current onslaught. Last weekend, a column
of their tanks swept heroically into Baghdad and out again. They
murdered people along the way. They blew off the limbs of women and the
scalps of children. Hear their voices on the unedited and unbroadcast
videotape: "We shot the shit out of it." Their victims
overwhelm the morgues and hospitals - hospitals already denuded of drugs
and painkillers by America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn in
humanitarian goods, approved by the Security Council and paid for by
Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation with minimal
anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound of freedom".

Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the
British helicopter pilot who came to blows with an American who had
almost shot him down. "Don't you know the Iraqis don't have a
fucking air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot reflect on the truth
he had uttered, on the whole craven enterprise against a stricken third
world country and his own part in this crime? I doubt it. The British
have been the most skilled at delusion and lying. By any standard, the
Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American machine was heroic.
With ancient tanks and mortars, small arms and desperate ambushes, they
panicked the Americans and reduced the British military class to one of
its specialities - mendacious condescension.

The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists",
"hoodlums", "pockets of Ba'ath Party loyalists",
"kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They are not real
people: cultured and cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary
of dishonour has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying it all from
the broadcasting box. "What do you make of Basra?" asked the
Today programme's presenter of a former general embedded in the studio.
"It's hugely encouraging, isn't it?" he replied. Their mutual
excitement, like their plummy voices, are their bond.

On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn,
a former BBC Middle East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this
"hugely encouraging" truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of
British soldiers smashing their way into a family home in Basra,
pointing their guns at a woman and manhandling, hooding and manacling
young men, one of whom was shown quivering with terror. "Is Britain
'liberating' Basra by taking political prisoners and, if so, based on
what sort of intelligence, given Britain's long unfamiliarity with this
territory and its inhabitants . . . The least this ugly display will do
is remind Arabs and Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double
standards - we can show your prisoners in . . . degrading positions, but
don't you dare show ours.".

Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is
"like World Cup football". There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr;
desperate refugees are streaming in and the hospitals are overflowing.
All this misery is due entirely to the "coalition" invasion
and the British siege, which forced the United Nations to withdraw its
humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic relief agency, which has
sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard humanitarian quota for water
in emergency situations is 20 litres per person per day. Cafod reports
hospitals entirely without water and people drinking from contaminated
wells. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.5 million people
across southern Iraq are without water, and epidemics are inevitable.
And what are "our boys" doing to alleviate this, apart from
staging childish, theatrical occupations of presidential palaces, having
fired shoulder-held missiles into a civilian city and dropped cluster
bombs?

A British colonel laments to his "embedded"
flock that "it is difficult to deliver aid in an area that is still
an active battle zone". The logic of his own words mocks him. If
Iraq was not a battle zone, if the British and the Americans were not
defying international law, there would be no difficulty in delivering
aid.

There is something especially disgusting about the
lurid propaganda coming from these PR-trained British officers, who have
not a clue about Iraq and its people. They describe the liberation they
are bringing from "the world's worst tyranny", as if anything,
including death by cluster bomb or dysentery, is better than "life
under Saddam". The inconvenient truth is that, according to Unicef,
the Ba'athists built the most modern health service in the Middle East.
No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime; but Saddam
Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a modern secular
society and a large and prosperous middle class. Iraq was the only Arab
country with a 90 per cent clean water supply and with free

education. All this was smashed by the Anglo-American
embargo. When the embargo was imposed in 1990, the Iraqi civil service
organised a food distribution system that the UN's Food and Agriculture
Organisation described as "a model of efficiency . . . undoubtedly
saving Iraq from famine". That, too, was smashed when the invasion
was launched.

Why are the British yet to explain why their troops
have to put on protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles
hit by American "friendly fire"? The reason is that the
Americans are using solid uranium coated on missiles and tank shells.
When I was in southern Iraq, doctors estimated a sevenfold increase in
cancers in areas where depleted uranium was used by the Americans and
British in the 1991 war. Under the subsequent embargo, Iraq, unlike
Kuwait, has been denied equipment with which to clean up its
contaminated battlefields. The hospitals in Basra have wards overflowing
with children with cancers of a variety not seen before 1991. They have
no painkillers; they are fortunate if they have aspirin.

With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera),
little of this has been reported. Instead, the media have performed
their preordained role as imperial America's "soft power":
rarely identifying "our" crime, or misrepresenting it as a
struggle between good intentions and evil incarnate. This abject
professional and moral failure now beckons the unseen dangers of such an
epic, false victory, inviting its repetition in Iran, Korea, Syria,
Cuba, China.

George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to
say: 'I was just following orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg
judges left in no doubt the right of ordinary soldiers to follow their
conscience in an illegal war of aggression. Two British soldiers have
had the courage to seek status as conscientious objectors. They face
court martial and imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have been
asked about them in the media. George Galloway has been pilloried for
asking the same question as Bush, and he and Tam Dalyell, Father of the
House of Commons, are being threatened with withdrawal of the Labour
whip.

Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said
the Prime Minister is a war criminal who should be sent to The Hague.
This is not gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair is a war
criminal, and all those who have been, in one form or another,
accessories should be reported to the International Criminal Court. Not
only did they promote a charade of pretexts few now take seriously, they
brought terrorism and death to Iraq. A growing body of legal opinion
around the world agrees that the new court has a duty, as Eric Herring
of Bristol University wrote, to investigate "not only the regime,
but also the UN bombing and sanctions which violated the human rights of
Iraqis on a vast scale". Add the present piratical war, whose
spectre is the uniting of Arab nationalism with militant Islam. The
whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning. Such is the
magnitude of their crime.